Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 18 July, 2010 10:00
Sunday Live with Adam Boulton

Any quotes used must be attributed to Sky News, Sunday Live 

ADAM BOULTON:

A party without a purpose is how the Sunday Telegraph today sums up Labour’s leadership election. A lot of people think things might have been better if John Cruddas had put himself forward as a candidate but he didn’t, instead he joins me now, welcome to you indeed.

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Good morning.

ADAM BOULTON:
Now you are running to be the chairman of the party, to chair the party.

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Well there’s a debate going on and a number of the candidates in the election say that the Chair of the party should be elected rather than just appointed by the leader and if that is the case and the changes to the rules go through then I’d put myself forward for it, yes.

ADAM BOULTON:
I thought Harriet Harman had the job for life?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Well she has the job as Deputy Leader, she has the job as Chair of the party and she had a number of other responsibilities as well but I think she agreed when we stood for the Deputy Leadership together that she thought the Chair of the party should be elected as well so I think there is quite a lot of uniform thinking across the party at the top that we need a different form of election whereby the Chairman isn’t just appointed to control the party, it is there to represent a lot of its views. 

ADAM BOULTON:
I have to ask you, why would you want that job rather than to be the leader?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Well the leadership issue was primarily about leading the parliamentary party in Westminster, the day to day combat across the floor from the Tories and that stuff doesn’t really interest me as much as the broader party rebuilding from the ground and articulating some of the issues and concerns of the grass roots from the bottom up.

ADAM BOULTON:
Now we all know what the result of the election was, although it wasn’t as clear cut as many people thought but since then you compare the performance of the Labour party, the leadership election, Peter Mandelson and all the rest, with the performance of the coalition, how do you score it?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Well I think the coalition looks like quite a substantial realignment of the centre right in this country and we shouldn’t underestimate the significance of it actually. It looks pretty robust and durable to me. The Labour party in contrast, we had one of the worst, the second worst defeat since 1931, we have a leadership election where a lot of the combatants are seeking to run away from their own involvement in the record and their decisions in it which I find is slightly unedifying, even as someone who disagreed with some of those things and we have these memoirs which are …

ADAM BOULTON:
What, you mean like saying things like I was never in favour of the Iraq war but I was bound up by Cabinet responsibilities?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Right, right, and even some of the things that I disagreed with, I find it slightly concerning, the velocity by which people are running from their own involvement in some of the decisions and I find that slightly difficult because I respect more those who stand by those decisions and say look, this is what the decisions were about and we have to have a degree of consistency. Then we have got this noise, this white noise of these memoirs, I’m not quite sure who is on the runway at the moment, it is Peter Mandelson’s one this week, another one will come along soon and that’s just ‘he said, she said’, a lot of it is and it is a lot of … you know, I think there is a lot of blood letting, I think there is a lot of personalities and there’s a danger that our legacy is weakened by the coalition itself, by our own leadership election and by noises off.

ADAM BOULTON:
So you mean by the candidates basically rubbishing …

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Well I think there is a danger of that and what we have to think through is the medium term consequences of that as an electoral strategy in the short term to get across the line in terms of the internal electorate in the party.

ADAM BOULTON:
If you take that, have you picked out a candidate yet?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
I haven’t yet. I thought what I am going to do is start seriously listening and reading what they’re doing and even though I criticise some of the ways they are running from some of the involvement in decisions, actually I think it is a more interesting contest than a lot of the media are defining it as. The last week I think it has come more to life, I have been reading some of the speeches by David and Ed Miliband, I think they have been really quite substantial and they are nudging towards something. My concern for them, it is actually the guys, is as soon as they became MPs they became members of the government so their actual political character has never been defined outside of office.

ADAM BOULTON:
Is that a problem do you think, that their route is … ?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
I think there is, that sort of fast track thing, you are on this escalator and he danger is that you don’t have a political character or identity outside of the office you hold. Compare that to ’97 where you had Mowlem or Kirk or Blunkett or Blair or Brown, these were significant rounded political characters before they achieved high office and there’s a danger of that coming after.

ADAM BOULTON:
Looking at some of the things you have been saying about the state of the country and about the political priorities, you talk a lot about a common good. It seems to me that that is quite close to the big society.

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Yes, it is, it is. I think it is very interesting, the whole big society debate. I like this compassionate Conservatism, I like it compared to that of …

ADAM BOULTON:
Do you believe in it?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
No, I like it because I like that form of Conservatism compared to some of the more brutal ones that I lived under when I was younger. Similarly I think we have to discover our own soul, what we stand for as a political party. I see you quoted that piece in the Telegraph this morning, that was arguing precisely that. It is not about lists of policies, it is deeper, it is deeper. We got 29% of the vote, 16% in the south east, we are going to have to go back to fundamentals about who we are. 

ADAM BOULTON:
Even on things like what you didn’t like about what’s happened over the last twenty years or so, what you call market fundamentalism, the market is right, increase in welfare inequality, not doing enough about poverty, I mean David Cameron talks about all those things.

JOHN CRUDDAS:
He does, he does. I mean we disagree about the remedies but I think it is good that you have a modern Conservatism that is trying to speak about uniform things about virtue and public life, in terms of the big society, we’re all in this together. We might disagree about the remedy being dismantling the state and removing the school capital programme and privatising the NHS, I disagree with some of those policies but the deeper project of compassionate Conservatism, yes, I think is good for the public at large if we have compassionate Conservatism and a revitalised Labour party, I think that's not a bad contest.

ADAM BOULTON:
But you are the opposition though, what do you do in this phase where there is a new government come in with fresh ideas some of which, at least the analysis you find sympathetic. I mean do you just go in the corner and go through the motions and …

JOHN CRUDDAS:
No, what you don’t do is you don’t just portray for example investment versus cuts or whatever. You need to acknowledge what they are doing, the scale of the problems that they have inherited, not least because of the financial crisis and actually support them when you think there is a positive element. For example, the Ken Clarke stuff on prison reform I thought was really interesting but our approach tended to be they’re soft on crime where I think we should have acknowledged what they are trying to do and supported them.

ADAM BOULTON:
You don’t think that was a figleaf to …

JOHN CRUDDAS:
To disguise the capital funding crisis? It might be but actually I think you have to take it literally in those instances, other times you need a more robust attack. For example, I’ve got a whole load of people from Dagenham Park School coming up to the House of Commons tomorrow because they are not going to get the secondary school they are crying out for and we are going to have a rally in Westminster to oppose the attacks on the Building Schools for the Future programme which is literally £250 million in our school borough so I think it is a question of not a blanket opposition but a construction one, but also identifying different priorities between a centre left and a centre right approach.

ADAM BOULTON:
And on defence or the big question now of Afghanistan, it seems to me listening to the candidates that we’ve got more and more people apparently saying that they never thought it was a particularly good idea. Do you see any possibility of Labour becoming the party of get out now?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
There seems to be a growing strain. I think there is a danger that that seeks to get out of our own culpability or obligation in the issue which I would favour a more pragmatic approach. On the question of defence generally, I would be less pragmatic and embrace the question of where does nuclear weaponry fit into the public debt question so again I don't think we should have a blanket opposition but we could have a more nuanced approached than we tend to be signalling at the moment.

ADAM BOULTON:
Because the problem – and you worked with Tony Blair, the whole New Labour argument was the moment that Labour blinked if you like on an issue like law and order, on an issue like defence, people would say Michael Foot, same old Labour party and never go near you again.

JOHN CRUDDAS:
That’s a tension but I think that's why a nuanced approach is right. What we can’t have is a total blanket opposition to any cuts for example. I would question the role of Trident, I would question the role of the Whitehall departments necessarily, why don’t we look at the role of some of the consultants who work in local government? These sorts of things should be on the table rather than going yay or nay and oppose across the board.

ADAM BOULTON:
Finally, for Labour, how big do you think the stakes are? Is there a possibility that you become a marginalised party of public service unions?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
I think there is a real problem here that if it is all tactics in the short term in terms of the cuts, if we don’t do the heavy lifting in terms of redefining what we’re about, this was our worst … we only got 200,000 more votes than we did in ’83, we have got to do some serious analysis of why, build up a coherent policy agenda for the medium term, rebuild on the ground. There are some brilliant examples of local organisations that we need to learn from but this cannot be a short term fix just to get over the line in a leadership election which closes down that more fundamental rethink that we need.

ADAM BOULTON:
You’re not going to tell me who you support but who do you think right now is looking like the person who is going to emerge?

JOHN CRUDDAS:
It is interesting. I think the two Milibands are doing well, I’ve been reading some of David Miliband speeches which I think are really interesting, some of the things he’s been writing. I think there is a fair distance to go, it is only beginning to start to take off for me.

ADAM BOULTON:
Voting hasn’t started yet.

JOHN CRUDDAS:
Voting is quite a long way away actually so there’s a bit of time and we should use that as an opportunity not just to list policy options but to get into some heavier deeper thinking.

ADAM BOULTON:
John Cruddas, thank you and the first Sunday in September we will have a live leaders’ debate here on Sunday Live so join us for that.